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Mike Taulty posted the first 6 items from his Blend Bits series.

Blend Bits 6: Paths Are Your Friend (2)

Once you’ve got a Path or two you can have fun with them by combining them in lots of different ways. For instance, if we take these 2 Rectangles that have been converted into Paths; then I can make them into a single Path that can then be manipulated “as one” by simply selecting them both and using the right mouse menu;

Mike Taulty announced he would be doing a session on Silverlight network stack in Birmingham, on Tuesday September 14th.

I won’t be introducing Silverlight as such but will, instead, be zooming in to look at the various communication options that the Silverlight developer has open to them and taking a bit of a tour around those options.

Mike Taulty announced that he's starting to share tips/tricks around Blend in a separate category on his blog.

I’m not a designer but I’ve been using Expression Blend since before it was first released for both Silverlight and WPF applications and it occurred to me that it might be useful to share some miniature tips/tricks around Blend in very short occasional blog posts so I’m going to have a go at that.

I’ll publish them under a category of “Blend Bits” and I’ll focus primarily on Silverlight. The category should show up here and grow over time.

I’ve been taking a look at the Reactive Extensions for .NET. It’s early days for me at this point but I’m finding what I’m seeing to be really interesting.

This is code that’s available from the DevLabs and there are versions for .NET 3.5 Sp1, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4 and also for JavaScript.

One of the strengths of WCF RIA Services is in its capabilities around the application of common validation logic on both the client tier and the service tier.

So, traditional sockets are great in that they allow full duplex comms such as when the server wants to notify the client that something has happened but they’re not so great in that they require an open connection which tends to limit your server side scalability. They’re also not so great when it comes to crossing boundaries that only allow HTTP on port 80 or 443.

I spent quite a lot of time with WCF Data Services (‘Astoria’/’ADO.NET Data Services’ as it was) in its first iteration.

It’s a framework that I really like so I’m feeling a little guilty that I haven’t found time to completely revisit it as it becomes part of a ‘much bigger thing’ (i.e. OData) and as it got rev’d in .NET 4.0 and (from a client perspective) Silverlight 4.

I certainly don’t claim that they’re comprehensive in any way, shape or form – just me making some use of Silverlight 4, the Bing Maps control, Visual Studio 2010 and a little bit of Expression Blend 4 to put something together.

I’m hoping to revisit with more explanation around some of the things that drop out of that tutorial if enough folks show interest in Silverlight on a site that’s about RIA but which is primarily (or entirely ) about Flash, ActionScript and Flex up until now so I’m very pleased to be able to put a little tiny sliver of Silverlight amongst those techs.

It’s a fairly common requirement that a business service authenticates a client and it’s usually (at least) for the purpose of authorisation whereby we can control which users have access to an application or to some of its functionality.

The two ways you usually go about it with a web site or web service are;

• integrated – i.e. let the web server do it via something like Basic Authentication, Digest Authentication, Windows Authentication.
• “forms” – i.e. the web server leaves the traffic well alone and something like ASP.NET steps in to make sure that each request carries an appropriate token (cookie) indicating that it has been authenticated. Unauthenticated traffic is usually redirected to a “login page” which harvests credentials and returns a suitable cookie to be replayed on subsequent requests.

Here you can find, Mike's previous posts from the series:

• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (1 - Overview)
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (2 – Services)
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (3 – Client)
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (4 – RIA Services Libraries)